Erhardt Graeff

The Inspection House: An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance by Tim Maly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Emily Horne and Tim Maly offer a contemporary tour through the carceral city and disciplinary society. Their “field guide” to the “conceptual terrain” of modern surveillance is a tour through prisons, ports, and financial centers—places where surveillance have encroached on their inhabitants beyond their expectations and certainly beyond the expectations of those whose idea it was to put it in place.

This field guide is mostly a tour through the ideas of the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham and the post-structuralist Michel Foucault. Using Bentham’s idea of the panopticon (or “inspection house”) prison design, Horne and Maly with the help of Foucault show us how the concept of asymmetrical surveillance has become the standard by which society polices itself.

Most critics point to ubiquitous cameras and the data collection involved with every digital transaction as the full realization of a panoptic society we are resigned to now live in. But this book only briefly talks about CCTV cameras and iPhones. The priority is given to Foucault’s concepts of the carceral city and disciplinary society. In the interest of security, we have adopted the design principles of prisons and brought them into every city to control the flow and behavior of people. Furthermore, these rules, norms, and fears have been internalized: we discipline ourselves.

This is not a wholly bad thing. We hope that others feel certain restrictions on their activities that might harm others. It means we are able to produce sophisticated technologies like the iPhone. And Bentham wanted this kind of self-discipline in prisons in order to reduce the need for corporal punishment. However, there might be psychological traumas unforeseen by these efforts. And now that this physical surveillance and carceral structures are less visible—subsumed in gardens that block explosive-laden trucks or passively tracking our moves through the city—what does this mean to our power to resist: how do we understand the power being wielded?

Unfortunately, this short book doesn’t let us dive deep on these questions. They are left as questions, sometimes not even fully articulated. Horne and Maly offer us a guide through some key ideas and ways they have become real and pervasive in modern society. But I wish they didn’t limit themselves to conceptual terrain. This book would have benefited from photos of the architectures of modern surveillance and a more comprehensive set of activities that walk us through the ideas in order to question and reflect on the society we have created—where we are pleased with it and where we find it lacking or even abhorrent.

Read it for the Bentham and Foucault and for the clever examples. Find a reading group for the rest.

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In Mistrust We Trust by Ivan Krastev

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ivan Krastev paints a bleak picture of the current state of democracy around the world. He argues that we so deeply mistrust our democratic institutions that it’s unclear what a corrective path forward looks like.

In Mistrust We Trust builds off Ivan’s 2012 TED talk in which he makes an abbreviated version of his argument based on five revolutions he identifies as contributing to the transformation of democratic society. First, the cultural and social revolution of the sixties destroyed the idea of a collective purpose by increasing individualism. This was followed by the market revolution of the 1980s whereby we saw a huge increase in inequality—decoupling the reduction of inequality with the spread of democracy for the first time. Then there was the end of Communism and the Cold War, which tore social contract between elites and the people in Eastern Europe. Then, the internet revolution, which brought echo chambers and political ghettoes—making it more difficult to understand people who aren’t you. Finally, Ivan points to the brain sciences revolution as arming political consultants with the knowledge that emotional manipulation is more powerful than ideas.

While the theory of revolutions is interesting and worth reflecting on, the most compelling part of the book is Ivan’s critique of transparency as a political religion riddled with inaccurate assumptions of how to “manage mistrust” in government. He argues that in fact we are fostering mistrust by trying to keep our representatives honest through monitoring, in other words we are assuming that control over others is equal to trust.

Without public trust democracy doesn’t work and a sustained campaign of transparency will only make it worse. We can’t simply design a foolproof system of good governance because that’s insufficient to convince us it is foolproof; it will merely press us to inspect it closer, confident we will find corruption lurking.

Ivan warns readers at the beginning of the book that it will not offer answers or solutions. It is a provocation. And I think it is an important one, especially for the civic activists and technologists in my circles. In some ways, Ivan is calling for the community-based and community-building efforts we celebrate in participatory design. BUT, if those efforts are always in opposition to and alternative from public institutions, rather than attempts to build them up into something we can believe in again, will things just keep getting worse?

A short, thought-provoking “must” read.

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Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a fun and detailed look through the early history of the Internet. I revisited key figures like JCR Licklider, Vint Cerf, and Jon Postel, who I first learned about during my freshman year of information technology education at RIT. And I learned the inane origins of the inane debate between TCP/IP and OSI that added mind-numbing tedium to my computer networking courses in high school.

The majority of the book though focuses on the relationship between the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and Cambridge, MA-based Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) that won the contract to construct the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. I didn’t appreciate the impressive feat of engineering undertaken to connect the first mainframe computers together. Over the course of months, programmers, engineers, and computer scientists, largely coming from MIT / Lincoln Laboratory and inspired by a few crude experiments, some mathematical theory, and the visionary scientists cum policymakers at ARPA, willed computer networking into existence.

At least that’s how it seems from the dramatic retelling offered by Hafner and Lyon in this book. For a nonfiction examination of technical protocol creation, this is a pretty decent page-turner. They don’t spare too many technical details either, which I absolutely drank up—probably because I was familiar with the basic concepts already and so could simply enjoy the backfill of context and sweat.

I definitely recommend this to folks interested in getting a better sense of how we came to have the “series of tubes” we call the internet, and in appreciating the openness, pragmatism, and genius that built it. I also think the book helps us appreciate the fragility of what we have come to take for granted, and the rarity of the moment in history where federal funding and a willingness to experiment allowed the ARPANET to happen.

Finally, I want to recognize the grad students. While the core hardware of ARPANET was a perfect example of government contracting with a determined company, the success of the internet as a broader experiment was built on the free time and inquisitiveness of graduate students who wanted to play and push the system further: creating an ad hoc system of protocols and proposals (RFPs) that led to the internet transforming how we live our lives. Those early pioneers deserve all our thanks for their late nights.

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